15 JUL 2009
_______________________________________
*Passenger jet crashes in northern Iran: report
*Crashed Iranian jet came down minutes after take-off
*168 reportedly killed in Iran plane crash
*Plane crashes in Iran, 168 believed killed
*168 Feared Dead After Plane Crashes in Iran
*Emirates Pilot Tells Story About A340 Tail Strike
*NTSB: Jet's design limited tear's damage
*Indonesia relieved after EU flight ban lifted
*New Commander for NOAA's Aircraft Operations
*****************************************
Passenger jet crashes in northern Iran: report
Iranian reports are stating that a passenger aircraft has crashed in the
northwest of the country.
Few details are available, although initial unconfirmed information suggests
Tehran-based Caspian Airlines is the operator.
Caspian Airlines uses Tupolev Tu-154 aircraft.
Reports point to the aircraft's having come down in Qazvin province. There
is no further information on passenger numbers or circumstances.
Source: Air Transport Intelligence news
****************
Crashed Iranian jet came down minutes after take-off
Preliminary indications from Iran indicate suggest 150 occupants were on
board the aircraft which crashed in the northwest of the country today.
Iran's state media says the Caspian Airlines aircraft had been operating
flight 7908, between Tehran and Yerevan, with 143 passengers and seven crew.
It had been 16min into the service when it came down, at about 11:33 in the
northwestern Qazvin province, 150km northwest of Tehran.
The aircraft type is given simply as a Tupolev, but Caspian Airlines' fleet
comprises Tupolev Tu-154 aircraft.
At least one report, citing the Iranian media, puts the figure for those on
board at 168.
Images from the scene show widespread fragments of wreckage in the area, and
there are no indications of survivors.
Source: Air Transport Intelligence news
***************
168 reportedly killed in Iran plane crash
Reuters - Jet crashes in Iran, all feared dead
TEHRAN, Iran - An Iranian passenger plane carrying 168 people crashed a
quarter-hour after takeoff Wednesday, smashing into a field northwest of the
capital and shattering to pieces. State television said all on board were
killed.
The impact gouged a deep trench in the dirt field, which was shown littered
with smoking wreckage in footage shown on state TV. It showed a large chunk
of a wing, but much of the wreckage appeared to be in small pieces, and
emergency workers and witnesses picked around the shredded metal for bodies.
The Russian-made Caspian Airlines jet was heading from Tehran to the
Armenian capital Yerevan near the village of Jannatabad outside the city of
Qazvin, around 75 miles northwest of Tehran, state television said. It
crashed at about 11:30 am, 16 minutes after taking off from Tehran's Imam
Khomeini International Airport, TV reported.
The Qazvin emergency services director Hossein Bahzadpour told the IRNA news
agency that the plane was completely destroyed and shattered to pieces, and
the wreckage was in flames. "It his highly likely that all the passengers on
the flight were killed," Bahzadpour said.
Iranian Civil Aviation Organization spokesman Reza Jafarzadeh told state
television that 153 passengers and 15 crewmembers were on board. State TV
said all were killed.
A Caspian Airlines representative told AP in Yerevan that most of the
passengers were Armenians, and that some Georgian citizens were also on
board. The representative spoke on condition of anonymity because she was
not authorized to talk to the press.
Also among the passengers were eight members of Iran's national youth judo
team, along with two trainers and a delegation chief, who were scheduled to
train with the Armenian judo team before attending competitions in Hungary
on Aug. 6, state TV said.
Caspian Airlines is a Russian-Iranian joint venture founded in 1993. Iran
has frequent plane crashes often because of bad maintenance of its aging
aircraft. Tehran blames the problem in part on U.S. sanctions that prevent
Iran from getting spare parts for some planes. Caspian Airlines, however,
uses Russian-made Tupolevs whose maintenance would be less impaired by
American sanctions.
In February 2006, a Russian-made TU-154 operated by Iran Airtour, which is
affiliated with Iran's national carrier, crashed during landing in Tehran,
killing 29 of the 148 people on board. Another Airtour Tupolev crashed in
2002 in the mountains of western Iran, killing all 199 on board.
The crashes have also affected Iran's military. In December 2005, 115 people
were killed when a U.S.-made C-130 plane, crashed into a 10-story building
near Tehran's Mehrabad airport. In Nov. 2007, a Russian-made Iranian
military plane crashed shortly after takeoff killing 36 members of the elite
Revolutionary Guards.
*****************
Plane crashes in Iran, 168 believed killed
All 168 aboard believed to be dead in Iranian plane crash
Plane is thought to have crashed near the Iranian city of Qazvin
Qazvin is the largest city in the province of Qazvin
(CNN) -- A plane crashed Wednesday in northwestern Iran, state television
reported. All 168 aboard were believed to be dead.
The passenger plane is thought to have crashed near the Iranian city of
Qazvin, Iranian Press TV reported.
The Russian-made Tupolev plane went down near Jannat-abad village near
Qazvin at 11:33 a.m. on Wednesday, the station reported.
All on board are "most probably" dead, the news station said, quoting Qazvin
Police Chief Hossein Behzadpour.
Qazvin is the largest city in the province of Qazvin and is its capital,
with an estimated population of 330,000.
It is about 140 kilometers (90 miles) northwest of the capital, Tehran.
Watch images of crash site >
The Iranian newspaper Hamshahri reported that the plane originated from
Tehran and was headed to Yerevan, Armenia.
The plane was from Caspian Air and crashed 16 minutes after takeoff, said
the newspaper, quoting a spokesman from Iran's civil aviation organization.
The flight number was 7908, the paper said, citing the spokesman.
Footage of the scene of the crash site showed a huge crater in the earth
scattered with pieces of the plane and tattered passports.
Aviation analyst Kieran Daly told CNN many aircraft operating in Iran are
ageing Tupolevs, some dating back to the 1970s.
He described Tupolevs as "workhorses of the old Soviet aviation system."
Watch Daly talk about air crash >
The last plane crash in Iran involving a Tupolev plane occurred in 2006,
according to the Web site airdisaster.com.
That crash occurred in Iran Air Tour flight from the port city Bandar Abbas
and crashed and caught fire in landing , the Web site reported.
Twenty-nine of the 147 people on board died in that crash.
*****************
168 Feared Dead After Plane Crashes in Iran
BEIRUT, Lebanon - A passenger plane bound for Armenia from Iran crashed
Wednesday morning in northwest Iran, and all 168 people aboard were believed
to have perished, Iranian state media reported.
A video grab from the Iranian official English-language satellite television
Press TV showing debris from the downed aircraft on Wednesday.
The plane, made by the Russian company Tupolev, crashed near the city of
Qazvin at about 11:30 a.m. local time after leaving Tehran on a flight to
Yerevan, the Armenian capital, Hussein Behzadpour, the police chief of
Qazvin, said in comments quoted by Iran's English language Press TV.
The crash site was near Jannatabad, a village just outside Qazvin, Mr.
Behzadpour said.
The spokesman for Iran's Aviation Organization, Reza Jafarzadeh, told Press
TV that the plane, Caspian Airlines Flight 7908, crashed 16 minutes after
taking off from Tehran's Imam Khomeini Airport. Qazvin is about 90 miles
northwest of Tehran.
The plane was carrying 153 passengers and 15 crew members, state television
reported. The broadcast showed wreckage mingled with human body parts, and a
fire brigade official was quoted as saying the debris was strewn over a
broad area.
Among the images was a crater gouged into farmland with mangled pieces of
metal scattered about, Reuters reported.
News reports said the pilot may have been trying an emergency landing after
technical problems occurred.
The Associated Press quoted a spokesman for the airline in Yerevan as saying
that most of the passengers were Armenians but that some Georgians also were
on board. Caspian Airlines is a Russian-Iranian joint venture founded in
1993, The A.P. said.
Iran has been plagued by plane crashes in recent years, a record that
aviation experts have attributed to the country's aging and outdated planes,
many of them secondhand aircraft leased from Russia.
In September 2006, a Russian-made Tupolev plane TU-154 apparently blew a
tire while landing in Mashhad, Iran, slipped off the runway and burst into
flames, killing 29 of the 148 people on board and injuring 47, state-run
television reported at the time.
More than 90 people, including 80 journalists, were killed in December 2005
when a military plane crashed into a building in Tehran. In February 2002, a
Tupolev TU-154 operated by Iran Air Tours crashed in Khorramabad, Iran,
killing all 118 people on board.
With no domestic aviation industry, the country is dependent on foreign
manufacturers for its planes. But trade sanctions in place for the past
three decades have hampered access to spare parts as well as purchases of
more modern aircraft, particularly from American manufacturers like Boeing.
In 2005, the International Civil Aviation Organization, an arm of the United
Nations, warned that sanctions flouted international treaties and placed
civilian lives in danger.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/16/world/middleeast/16plane.html?hpw
***************
Emirates Pilot Tells Story About A340 Tail Strike
Narrowly Avoided A Disaster Down Under
Officials say it was the closest thing Australia has had to a major air
catastrophe, and after 4 months of silence, the pilot has finally told his
story to the Australia Herald Sun...
The A340 was fully loaded with 257 passengers and 18 crew on board. As it
approached the end of the runway of Melbourne Airport on its takeoff roll,
the pilot knew they were not fast enough to provide the required lift. He
pushed the engines to 'Take Off And Go-Around' power and rotated, bouncing
the tail of the Airbus three times off the pavement and hitting the REIL
lights at the end of the runway as the airplane finally became airborne.
After 30 minutes dumping fuel over Port Phillip Bay, they returned to
Melbourne and landed safely, but the Emirates pilot was badly shaken.
The pilot said he still doesn't know exactly how he managed to get the
Airbus in the air. "I . . . sort of reacted on instinct," he told the Herald
Sun. "I had a feeling that (something) wasn't working, but I couldn't find
out what was wrong. I knew I couldn't stop. At that point I knew we just had
to go. And we got it off the ground, miraculously."
Safety investigators found that the First Officer was flying the plane when
the Captain called "Rotate". When it failed to fly, he called "Rotate"
again, which caused the first tail strike. It was then that he pushed the
plane to Take Off and Go-Around power and hit the tail again as they became
airborne. Once off the ground, they realized that the calculated departure
weight was 100 tons lighter than the actual weight of the airplane. While
the crew is not responsible for entering the takeoff weight, they are
responsible for checking that it is correct. The typo meant incorrect
calculations of takeoff power and requisite speeds.
According to the Herald Sun, the pilot has left Dubai with his family and
returned to Europe, where he is from. He reportedly had slept only 3 1/2
hours in the 24 before he was scheduled to fly, and both he and the co-pilot
were handed prepared letters of resignation when they returned to Dubai
after the incident. There were four pilots on board the aircraft, including
two relief pilots, due to the 14 1/2 hour length of the flight from
Melbourne to Dubai.
FMI: www.atsb.gov.au
aero-news.net
*****************
NTSB: Jet's design limited tear's damage
By Alan Levin, USA TODAY
A Southwest Airlines jet that peeled open at 34,000 feet frightened
passengers with a loud bang and forced them to breath through oxygen masks,
but the plane performed as designed to limit damage, federal investigators
said Tuesday.
Flight 2294 from Nashville to Baltimore lost pressure Monday night when a
14-by-17-inch rectangle of the Boeing 737-300's skin ripped loose, said
National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) spokesman Peter Knudson. Pilots
made an emergency landing in Charleston, W.Va.
Passenger Charles Overby, who was sitting at the front of the plane, said he
heard a pop about 30 minutes after takeoff.
Overby, CEO of the Newseum in Washington and chairman and CEO of the Freedom
Forum, a non-partisan foundation dedicated to the First Amendment, said
oxygen masks dropped but no one seemed to panic.
The plane's three flight attendants reacted quickly, he said. "They went
from being the casual, joking flight attendants that Southwest is known for,
to being strictly business."
He did not see flight attendants don oxygen masks and items did not fly
about the cabin, indications that the jet did not experience the type of
violent decompression that has caused severe damage in other cases.
Federal regulations require that jets be built to withstand a tear in the
fuselage without spreading or damaging other parts. A preliminary
examination showed that "this safety feature performed as designed," Knudson
said.
Structural failures that lead to lost pressure are very rare; it's even
rarer that they lead to passenger deaths.
A flight attendant died on an Aloha Airlines 737 on April 28, 1988, in
Hawaii, when 18 feet of the jet's skin peeled back at 24,000 feet. The NTSB
ruled that undetected fatigue had weakened the jet. The accident prompted
broad inspections of aging planes.
Southwest Airlines inspected all 181 of its Boeing 737-300 jets after the
incident Monday and found no other problems, spokeswoman Beth Harbin said.
The damaged jet was delivered to the airline in 1994.
In March, Southwest agreed to pay $7.5 million to settle charges that it
operated planes that had missed required safety inspections for cracks in
the fuselage. The inspections were prompted by the Aloha crash in 1988.
The airline had made nearly 60,000 flights without the inspections.
Southwest inspected the planes last year and insisted that safety had not
been compromised.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2009-07-14-southwest-plane-hole_N.htm
****************
Indonesia relieved after EU flight ban lifted
JAKARTA (AFP) - Indonesia has welcomed the European Union's decision to
remove flag-carrier Garuda Airlines and three other Indonesian airlines from
its aviation blacklist.
The EU's executive commission announced Tuesday that Indonesia had achieved
"significant improvements" in safety since all Indonesian-registered
aircraft were banned from EU airspace in June 2007, after several deadly
crashes.
"This is the fruit of our labour. We appreciate the passion, trust and
technical cooperation which has been shown by the European Union safety
unit," Transport Minister Jusman Syafii Djamal told reporters.
"This was not an easy journey."
The flight ban had angered Indonesia and complicated talks between the huge
mainly Muslim country and Brussels over a partnership agreement.
The European Commission said Garuda Indonesia, Airfast Indonesia, Mandala
Airlines and Prime Air "can be taken off the list because their authority
ensures that they respect the international safety standards."
None of the airlines currently flies to European territory but Garuda is
reportedly considering opening new routes to Europe.
Garuda chief executive Emirsyah Satar plans to launch flights to Amsterdam
in the first half of 2010 and will look at other European destinations after
that, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The airline also wants to inaugurate services to the United States, and
plans to double its fleet to 116 aircraft in the next five years, including
larger Boeing 777s and Airbus 330-200s, Satar was quoted as saying.
The EU ban was enacted on the basis of a report from the International Civil
Aviation Organization following a string of crashes which killed more than
100 people.
Indonesia introduced new air safety regulations last year, incorporating
international standards including the creation of a safety committee
answerable to the president.
Violators face tougher penalties up to five years' jail and fines up to 500
million rupiah (46,000 dollars).
Djamal said other improvements had been made in airline staff numbers and
training, as well as investments in equipment.
Tourism ministry official Jordi Paliama, the deputy director of promotions
for Europe, said the EU's move would boost the local tourism industry and
encourage Europeans to holiday in the massive archipelago.
"The EU's decision reaffirms that travelling with Indonesian airlines,
especially the national carrier Garuda, is safe," he told AFP.
"The lifting of the ban automatically increases people's trust in Indonesian
airlines. It will automatically boost the number of incoming tourists from
Europe."
Despite its poor safety record and the global economic downturn which has
savaged the airline industry, Garuda posted a 10-fold increase in profits
last year thanks to increased revenue and passenger numbers.
The company's net profit for 2008 surged to 670 billion rupiah (60.97
million dollars) from 60 billion rupiah the year before.
*****************
New Commander for NOAA's Aircraft Operations
Assuming command of the NOAA Aircraft Operations Center in Tampa, Florida,
is Captain William B. Kearse, relieving Captain Brian Taggart who has served
as the center's commanding officer since July 2007.
Located on MacDill Air Force Base, this center is home to most of NOAA's
fourteen research aircraft including the WP-3D Orion "Hurricane Hunter" and
the Gulfstream-IV hurricane surveillance Jet.
Captain Kearse has served on a variety of NOAA aircraft and vessels and has
been a commissioned officer in the NOAA Corps* since 1986. He served for 14
years as an aircraft and mission commander and is the former chief of the
NOAA Aircraft Operation Center's photo survey branch.
Formed in 1970 NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)was
born as a combination of the US Weather Bureau, the Bureau of Commercial
Fisheries and the US Coast and Geodetic Survey.
NOAA is on the job daily with weather forecasts, severe storm warnings and
hurricane alerts, providing up to the minute information for the protection
of life and property.
The NOAA fleet of aircraft and vessels is operated, managed and maintained
by the NOAA Office of Marine and Aviation Operations, which includes
civilians and officers of the NOAA Corps*.
Yesterday's change-of-command ceremony was presided over by Rear Adm. Philip
Kenul, director of NOAA's Marine and Aviation Operations Centers.
http://www.examiner.com/x-8151-Charleston-Military-Community-Examiner~y2009m
7d14-New-Commander-for-NOAAs-Aircraft-Operations
****************
Curt Lewis, P.E., CSP
CURT LEWIS & ASSOCIATES, LLC